FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 9, 2008

With the recent success and publicity of William Pope.L’s ANIMAL NATIONALISM at the Kansas
City Convention Center (September 5–12) and Grand Arts (until October 18, 2008) we are pleased
to highlight these local reviews of the project:

Art Critic Alice Thorson’s preview of ANIMAL NATIONALISM from the Kansas City Star [click here]

The related KC Star video podcast “Viewers to Feel Democracy” [click here]

KCUR’s Laura Spencer interview with William Pope.L and Artistic Director Stacy Switzer [click here]

Pope.L’s video and performance piece, Small Cup, remains on view at Grand Arts along with the “What Does Your Democracy Look Like?” Art & Essay contest entries from Kansas City Metro area students through October 18th. Gallery hours are Thursday and Friday 10–5, Saturday 11–5 with accompanying performances at 4:30PM.

This fall Grand Arts continues collaboration with the artist collective SPURSE as they travel to Iqualuit, Nunavet, Canada’s arctic province in September and October as part of Deep Time + Rapid Time, an ongoing project with an exhibition at Grand Arts opening Friday, February 6th–March 21, 2009. For this research intensive project, Spurse is developing practices “that allow us to be in the world in a manner that affectively senses the qualitative force of both deep time and rapid time (as in rapid climate change).” Spurse is partnering locally with the Linda Hall Library, The Land Institute, Paleosearch Inc., and others. Modular migrant clothing/housing designs for DT+RT migration were developed this summer with a Spurse-led workshop at the Kansas City Art Institute. Spurse’s participation in the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival featured a Deep Time + Rapid Time investigation, Crooked River in the First & Third Person. Another DT+RT component tested this fall was Eleven Listening Posts for an Entangled Agent: Denver, a Spurse-designed map distributed in conjunction with the city-wide arts event Dialog:City, timed to coincide with the 2008 Democratic National Convention. For more information visit www.spurse.org.

In fall 2009, Grand Arts will premiere a lavish spectacle created by Kansas City artist Cody Critcheloe and his band SSION. Critcheloe and SSION have been working on a movie based on their latest album, Fool’s Gold for two years. Individual music videos from the movie in process are available on YouTube. Next month, Critcheloe’s work will be featured in the exhibition Heartland at the Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, jointly organized with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Heartland will travel to the Smart Museum in fall 2009. We would also like to congratulate Seth Johnson (Omaha, NE) and Jaimie Warren (Kansas City, MO) whose work will be included in this wide-ranging exhibition focused on artistic production and collaborations in the midwestern United States.

www.ssion.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkvNpNuw1C4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzrBxlP02HA
www.heartlandeindhoven.nl

Grand Arts is also excited about our ongoing collaboration with New York and New Haven-based artist Tavares Strachan. Strachan is currently in Star City, Russia, site of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, undergoing cosmonaut training as part of an upcoming project called The Orthostatic Tolerance. Strachan was included in the summer 2007 Grand Arts exhibition From the Fat of the Land: Alchemies, Ecologies, Attractions. Strachan’s exhibition at Grand Arts is tentatively scheduled for late fall 2009.

In additional news, Sanford Biggers’ Blossom, produced by Grand Arts in the fall of 2007, is being featured in Prospect.1 New Orleans. The New Orleans biennial will also feature work by Nadine Robinson who exhibited at Grand Arts in late 2005. www.prospectneworleans.org

A version of Berlin-based olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas’ The FEAR of Smell–the Smell of FEAR, shown at Grand Arts in January 2007, traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing this summer as part of Synthetic Times–Media Art China 2008, organized in connection with the Olympics. Tolaas will return to Grand Arts in 2009–10 to create a new project based on the olfactory environments of Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas.

The Center for Tactical Magic’s Tactical Ice Cream Unit, produced at Grand Arts in 2005, was recently featured in DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: THE NATIONAL CAMPAIGN, organized by Creative Time. The Tactical Ice Cream Unit was featured on the front page of the New York Times Arts section on September 23, 2008 and on the New York Times blog. www.creativetime.org

Please check our website for updates, special events and upcoming exhibition dates.
For more information contact:
Lacey Wozny
Assistant Director
lacey@grandarts.com
www.grandarts.com